Hey guys, I've got 2 hdd's in my laptop and I've been distro jumping
enough lately that I set the second drive to be "/personal" with
Documents/Videos/Music/Games etc in there, and then when I install a new
distro I delete the folders in my /home, go to /personal, drag
everything back to home and click "link here" It works great and solve
99% of my issues. Except one.

Traditionally, one simply puts /home on its own partition, and installs
don't touch home except for (optional) user creation, which is otherwise
done afterward. An admin then mounts /home and adjusts user/group
numbers for accounts found there to match what's already on the
preexisting /home. (This is done by editing the appropriate user and
group files in /etc, either as part of user creation or immediately
before/after user creation.)

And I used to do that, Duncan, putting /home seperately, but I stopped
after I had a cluster-fsck when switching distros with different
package versions that required different style configs... lets just
say it was ugly when I logged in after installing. Besides I like to
know what the 'default feel' of a distro, and if it automaticaly knows
to load my themes / wallpapers / sounds and stuff like that, then I
don't know what the devs worked so hard on. So, this set up lets me
just keep my actual files.

As I mentioned above, I have a games folder where I keep some wine based
games that I play a lot. And its really to have to everytime I install a
new distro go into the Kickoff Configuration settings, and manually add
back to the entries for each game one at a time.

Really, I guess my question is this; where does KDE keep the config
files for Kickoff menu? And is there really anyway I could,
realistically and practically, automate adding the entries back in? I
don't know how KDE stores the entries so I dont know if a script would
be appropriate, or if this is just one of those 'bite the bullet and do
it yourself' situations.

One caveat to the below: I dumped proprietary years ago and in general
couldn't legally install or run anything proprietary even if I wanted to,
since I can't agree to the EULAs, etc, which normally means the copyright
owners don't grant me permission to copy and run their executables even
if I'd want to. And for freedomware there's generally more choice on
Linux than on MS platforms so there's little reason I'd be interested in
wine, and indeed, I've never even had it installed. (Back before I
switched to Linux instead of downgrading to eXPrivacy from MS Windows 98,
I thought I might have to run wine for some things, but was pleasantly
surprised to find native freedomware Linux apps to fill my needs. So I
never ended up installing wine at all.) As such, to the extent that wine
apps may have rules and behavior differing from the below, I wouldn't
know it.

And thats all well and good :) I've even found a few Linux-native
games that I enjoy very much. But you can't really replace the
classics like the Baldur's Gate saga, Icewind Dale, and the likes
haha.

In particular, you need the information on the environmental vars related
to filesystem location, both kde-specific and xdg/freedesktop.org. Those
are found here, under filesystem (#4) and fredesktop.org (#8).

Specifically, you're interested in $KDEHOME (4.2) $XDG_DATA_HOME (9.1)
and XDG_CONFIG_HOME (9.2), as well as possibly the system parallels to
them, KDEDIRS (4.1), XDG_DATA_DIRS (9.3) and XDG_CONFIG_DIRS (9.4).

However, given that you mentioned scripting, it sounds like you're
advanced enough that you may find the whole guide interesting, or if you
don't have time for all that, at least the whole section on environmental
variables, not just the ones mentioned above.

Condensing the information found at the locations above...

KDE's config comes from multiple places. In order of priority, there's
the environmental vars, then three locations in $HOME (as listed in the
environmental vars if set), three in the system (again, environmental
vars if set), and finally, built-in app-defaults, for stuff not found in
any of the earlier config locations.

Generally speaking, MOST of kde's config resides in $KDEHOME ($HOME/.kde
by default, .kde4 on some distros), with a parallel location in $KDEDIRS
(/usr on most distros, occasionally /opt).

In practice, that means most user config in the $HOME/.kde/share/apps and
config subdirs (config containing individual files, apps containing app-
specific subdirs). If a specific user's config hasn't been set, the
fallback is then to the parallel system dir locations, very often
/usr/share/apps and /usr/share/config.

However, since kde follows the freedesktop.org/xdg configuration
standards, menus are not kept in $KDEHOME (and the system parallel
thereof, $KDEDIRS) but rather in $XDG_DATA_HOME, normally
$HOME/.local/share/applications (and the system parallel thereof,
$XDG_DATA_DIRS, often /usr/share/applications).

Relevant Pages

Re: [kde] Kickoff Menu Config... and then when I install a new ... new distro go into the Kickoff Configuration settings, ... KDE's config comes from multiple places. ... menus are not kept in $KDEHOME (and the system parallel...(KDE)

Re: [opensuse] Re: starting the virtualbox virtual machines automatically... but it *is* config in that it determines the state of the machine ... how it differs from baseline install.... Any time something comes up that would otherwise involve writing some custom file into any system directory, ... I create or modify a package and install that package, and/or I figure out how to relocate the custom part to someplace sane, and usually there is already some means to do that and all I have to do is bother to use it. ...(SuSE)

Re: Courier-imap authentification... I run both of these but my initial install and config was done years ago and ... setting up webmail but never did (most webmail apps use maildir format).... Please note that my config is old and simple - YMMV! ... i've open my 993 port on my gate to have access to it. ...(comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc)

Re: Time to start Linuxing..some questions?... Now I need a distro.... looks and feels just like Windows' window manager on it. ... You can install MandrivaOne onto your ...servers if you get tired of doing it by hand. ...(comp.os.linux.misc)